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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Last week, the subject of nuclear power came up on the culture war thread. As with all my other online places, all the comments when I looked were pro-nuclear. It seems that every place I see online has a pro-nuclear community.

I'm more of a fence-sitting non-expert, so I thought I would take this opportunity to ask about the give the anti-nuclear concerns that I don't usually see the pro-nuclear community addressing.

First off, safety: it's true that nuclear has a much better safety record so far, but nuclear seems to have the potential for black swan disasters in a way that coal is not. Is this true? If so, the record so far is not a good way to analyze risk. If nuclear power comes into common use, we should expect to have the power plants occasionally sabotaged or targeted in war and frequently run under oversight even less competent than the Soviet Union was, among other things. To bring me away from fence-sitting towards pro-nuclear, I would need to see a safety argument that addresses the disaster possibilities both accidental and intentional.

Second, what's up with nuclear waste? Specifically, if the waste is really a nothing burger, as I see argued often, why do I see (other) experts talking about how to communicate how bad it is to people ~10k years in the future. What are those other experts thinking and why are they wrong?

Here you go: https://gordianknotbook.com/download/why-nuclear-power-has-been-a-flop/.

The guy also runs a substack that has the same information in easier bite-sized pieces: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/.

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